between the pitch and the grandstands. There was Squallus, Norbert, Beetlebrick, and a few others James didn't know.
Figgle raised her hands in the same gesture James had seen the house-elves in the Great Hall use to gather up the tablecloths. The pile of laundry clumped into a large ball and a bed sheet cocooned around it, the four corners tying at the top. Figgle tossed a small puff of pink powder onto the gigantic ball of laundry and snapped her fingers again. The ball of laundry vanished, presumably to reappear in the basements. She looked nervously at the stairs.
'Well?' Ralph asked James in a tight, worried voice.
'I can't see Tabitha,' James answered, trying to keep his voice calm. 'Or Philia Goyle. They aren't out on the pitch anymore as far as I can see.'
'What? Well, where are they?'
'I don't know. They seem to be off the map at the moment.'
Figgle was looking at them, her eyes wide and alert. She seemed to sense something was even more wrong than it had been a minute ago. James studied the Marauder's Map keenly, watching the huge blank spots to see if Goyle and Corsica would appear out of them. He kept a sharp eye on the blank spot at the door to the Slytherin quarters.
'Oh, no,' he said, his eyes widening. 'Here they come! What are they doing here now?'
'Get rid of the map!' Ralph said, his face going pasty white. 'Come on! Zane!' he called up the steps. There was no answer.
Figgle's expression had gone from alarm to raw panic. 'Mistress Corsica is coming! Figgle has done an awful thing! Figgle will be punished!' She bolted for the stairs, snapping her fingers as she went. There was that sudden sensation of change, as if an invisible light had popped back on, and James knew that the Boundary Charm over the stairs was in place again. There was a clatter of footsteps and muffled voices both from upstairs as well as from the front door of the common room. James balled the Marauder's Map roughly and jammed it into his open backpack. Ralph threw himself onto the nearest couch, trying to affect a scene of lazy indolence. The door swung open just as James re-shouldered his backpack and turned.
Tabitha Corsica and Philia Goyle stepped through the doorway. Their eyes fell on James and both of them went silent. Tabitha was dressed in a sport cloak and black capris, her broomstick over her shoulder. Her hair was in a neat ponytail, and even though she had, only minutes before, been swooping over the Quidditch pitch on her unusually magical broom, she appeared as cool and fresh as a tulip. She spoke first.
'James Potter,' she said mildly, having almost instantly recovered from her surprise at seeing him. 'What a pleasure.'
'What are you doing here?' Philia demanded, scowling.
'Philia, don't be rude,' Tabitha said, moving into the room and passing James breezily. 'Mr. Potter is as welcome among us as I'm sure we would be amongst the Gryffindors. If we don't have goodwill during these difficult times, what have we got? Good afternoon, Mr. Deedle.'
Ralph croaked something from the couch, looking remarkably awkward and uncomfortable. Philia continued to stare hard at James, her expression openly hostile, but she remained silent.
'It's a shame about the Gryffindor Quidditch team,' Tabitha called from a corner of the room as she hung up her cloak. 'We always love a Gryffindor versus Slytherin match for the tournament, don't we, Ralph? I'm sure it pains your friends not to be out scrimmaging with us as we speak, James. Please give them our sympathies. By the way…,' Tabitha crossed the room again, heading toward the stairs to the girls' sleeping quarters, 'I saw several of the Ravenclaw players out at the pitch studying our drills. Interesting that your friend, Zane, wasn't among them. You haven't seen him, have you?' She tapped her broomstick on the floor idly, watching James' face.
James shook his head, not daring to speak.
'Hm,' Tabitha murmured thoughtfully. 'Curious, that. Nevertheless. Come, Philia.'
James watched, horrified, as Tabitha and Philia began to climb the steps. He thought furiously, trying to invent a quick diversion, but nothing came.
'Sod off!' a pair of muffled voices suddenly squeaked.
Both Tabitha and Philia stopped in their tracks. Philia, on the first step, whipped around angrily. Tabitha, ahead of her, turned much more slowly, a look of polite wonderment on her face.
'Did you say something?' she asked James slowly.
James coughed. 'Er, no. Sorry. Got a, uh, frog in my throat.'
Tabitha watched him for a long moment, then tilted her head slightly and narrowed her eyes at Ralph. Finally, she turned away and disappeared up the rest of the stairs with Philia following, glancing back furiously. After a few moments, their footsteps could be heard from above. There were no angry screams or sounds of struggle.
'Grotty blighter!' quacked the muffled voices again.
'That crazy loon!' Ralph rasped, jumping up and grabbing his bag. 'What's he doing?'
'Come on!' James said, lunging toward the door. 'If he's still up there, we can't help him.'
They both ran out into the hallway and threaded their way around several random corridors before finally stopping. Panting and hearts pounding, they dug their rubber ducks out of their bags, each examining his own even though they were identical. Two words were scrawled on the bottom of the ducks in black ink:
'That crazy loon!' Ralph said again, but he was almost laughing with relief. 'Figgle just took him down to the cellars with the rest of the dirty sheets! I say we leave him there.'
James grinned. 'No, let's go get him before they try to stick him in the wringer. He probably deserves it, but first, I want to know what he might have found out.'
The two boys ran to find the washrooms in the cellars. James stopped only once to ask directions from an annoyingly observant servant in a painting of a gaggle of dining knights.
'I hardly had two minutes to look around before Figgle came up the stairs like a cannonball,' Zane told James and Ralph when they found him in the washrooms. 'She threw a handful of pink dust at me, and then pow! I'm down here.'
Ralph was looking around in awe at the enormous copper vats and the clanking machinery of the washers. Elves bustled around them, ignoring the three boys completely as they moved through the hive of their basement work space. Two elves on a catwalk above the vats were dumping wheelbarrows of powdered soap into the frothing water. White flakes filled the air and stuck like snow in the boys' hair.
'Trust me, this all gets a lot less interesting after two minutes or so,' Zane said tersely. 'Especially when the Lollipop Guild here won't let you leave.' Three elves were clustered around Zane, looking at him with obvious hostility.
'Figgle brings a human down to the washrooms, we keeps him until someone explains why,' the oldest and grumpiest elf said in a gravelly voice. 'S'policy. Humans interfering with elf work is against Hogwarts Code of Conduct and Practices, section thirty, paragraph six. So, then, who be you two?'
James and Ralph exchanged blank looks. Ralph said, 'We're his… well, we're his friends, aren't we? We came to bring him back upstairs.'
'Did you, then?' the elf said with a penetrating glare. 'Figgle tells a story about this human trying to do her
